“It was fun. The fact that it was illegal was part of the allure – it felt like I was getting away with something, like the thrill a kleptomaniac gets when they steal something. I felt like I was screwing the system in some way.” Eric stretches out, puts his feet up on the coffee table and lazily runs his hand back and forth across his black crew cut. His body is compact and muscular like a fighting dog, and covered in fist-sized tattoos, many of them logos for sports teams, bands or automotive companies. “I always paid my rent in cash, and it was kinda funny to me that I was handing over all this dirty money to my landlord.”
Eric no longer has a landlord; he’s currently paying off the mortgage on his bachelor suite, just off Commercial Drive in East Vancouver. As with most apartments of this size, it feels smaller than it actually is, due to the amount of furniture squeezed into it. Eric built both of the tables in here from steel and wood. One is too low, the other is too high.
“Back in Montreal, in high school, I was a pretty big nerd, a bit of an outcast,” he says with a smirk, “but in senior high, my parents were in the process of getting divorced, so I took a lot of liberties. I started selling cigarettes, initially, then hustling acid, then weed. I never used the drugs – I just saw it as a way to make money.” Eric quickly found his popularity taking a 180 degree turn. “I became the most sought-after person, just for having easy access to cigarettes and drugs.”
Eric migrated to the West Coast in 1998 to study radio at BCIT and threw himself head-first into the music scene. “A lot of friends needed weed and honestly, I don’t think I had any more access than anyone else; I was just a cheap ass and I didn’t want to pay retail for anything – I wanted to pay wholesale.”
He reaches down past his baggy shorts and rubs his 40 year old legs, which look like a chopping block of deep scars, left from a lifetime of thrashing around on skateboards, bicycles and motorcycles. “I’m not very risk averse. I think some of my friends were definitely concerned by some of my choices. I remember buying my first serious amount of drugs from a kid who delivered it to me on a bicycle – a guy named Pablo – I remember meeting up with him in back alleys in Kitsilano and he’d show up on his BMX. It never occurred to me that there were any consequences to it. I was kinda naive, I guess.”
Without warning or provocation, Eric’s Boston Terrier wakes from her slumber on the bed, yaps furiously at the air, then settles back down. The bed is bordered on three sides by chest-high bookshelves made from thick pieces of lumber – another one of Eric’s projects. The shelves contain travel guides, model cars, motorcycle helmets, a jar full of white air soft pellets and a replica of a 9mm handgun.
“There was never really a situation where I felt like I was putting myself in harm’s way with dangerous people. I never really saw the crime side of things – it was always just people doing transactions. It wasn’t dramatic like a TV show or a movie. Maybe I was connected enough, or had enough of a social circle that I never really feared for myself. If anything, the only thing I was ever afraid of was cops.”
In 2005, Eric went back to school to become a high school shop teacher. “Dealing weed is a very easy way to make money while you’re studying – you sit at home, do your homework, people call you up and then stop by and pick up. I could make fifty bucks while I was doing my homework.” For the next decade, Eric taught high school during the day and dealt weed every night, fully aware of the repercussions if he were caught. “I would have no career. My career would be over. I would have to find a form of income that would be accepting of the fact that I have a criminal record.” Despite the inherent risks, Eric felt it was a safe gamble. “There’s a difference between possibility and probability. Possibility is 50/50. I always felt the probability was very low.”
Those odds changed when one of Eric’s disgruntled ex-clients posted a group photo on Twitter, tagged the Vancouver Secondary Teachers Association and commented below: “One of these teachers is selling drugs.” Eventually, it was enough to scare Eric straight. “In the end, I had to get out because it wasn’t worth people having things on me, I saw it as a weakness, a place where people had potential power over me, and I didn’t like that feeling.”
Eric reaches down to the miniature black and white cat lying next to him on the couch and strokes her fur. She purrs and leans into his hand, soaking up the attention. “There’s no part of me that misses getting phone calls all the time. Even before the dispensaries, for me, it was already fading.”
“The proliferation of dispensaries definitely did take a toll on the number of clients I had. I think the prices were competitive, they offer more variety, and the novelty of going into a store to sample a bunch of different varieties appeals to a lot of people. After a point, the margins were the same but the volume wasn’t there, so it didn’t really seem worthwhile anymore.”
He leans forward and picks up a small Ziploc bag from the coffee table and inspects its contents. “Also, I recognize the consequences now more than ever.” He shakes the Ziploc in the air like a tiny little bell. “Most recently, I’ve come to recognize the detriment that weed has had in my own life – the lack of productivity and lack of motivation. And as a teacher, seeing the way kids view weed as a fun activity. Seeing the juvenile mind’s perception of marijuana kinda turned me off of the big push for legalization.”
“On a larger scale, all across North America, I think parents need to be more involved in their kids lives and have more open conversations with their kids and be more supportive of their kids. Without that, I don’t even think that legalization is a reasonable conversation to have.”
“While I believe in the value of drugs, I don’t think that we as North Americans, have the maturity to deal with legalization. We, as a culture, are very immature, we’ve lived a very entitled lifestyle over the past fifty years and I think that because of that we don’t tend to value work and we don’t value moderation. In a lot of ways, I think a lot of people’s lives are quite empty and they’re always chasing the new high.”
“Sure, it’s part of Vancouver culture, I suppose, and I’m glad to say that I experienced it and got out mostly unscathed, but it could have ended up messy, very messy.”
Creative Nonfiction by Drew Clarke 